He was a Jimmy Stewart kind of man. Tall and lanky, quiet and deliberate. His sense of humor and fun was unparalleled amongst his large group of friends, those he worked with and in those couples with whom my parents socialized. From my childhood memory, his essence still defines the meaning of taciturn, though he wasn’t an untalkative man. He had a disposition of silence. But when he spoke, I remember listening.
 | Jimmy Stewart (George): Now, come on, get your clothes on, and we'll stroll up to my car and get... Oh, I'm sorry. I'll stroll. You fly.
Henry Travers (Clarence): I can't fly. I haven't got my wings.
Jimmy Stewart (George): You haven't got your wings. Yeah, that's right
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I listen still, though it has been too many years, and so many stories and memories patched together from other tongues tend to blur my recall. Sometimes I think I can hear his voice, accented with an old-country Norwegian accent, born and bred in early 19th century Minnesota, and fostered on the Bering Sea through years of commercial fishing with other Scandinavian-Americans who left the land for the ocean during the Depression and World War. I can’t even begin to wonder what his voice is saying now; he left too early in 1969, and my, how our world has changed. I’ve written a bit about my dad before.
 | A shanty cabin onshore at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, somewhere around 1938. |
I have no doubt that my father would have adapted to the changes we’ve seen since 1969. He was mighty good adapting. With a high school education that I suspect was hard fought, due to his delay in learning written English until he was around the age of ten, he started fishing in Alaska right out of high school in 1936. In off seasons from fishing, he worked on the docks of Seattle as a longshoreman. For extra change, he was a short order cook in an all-night restaurant during the war, and that job ended his bachelor status. He met a waitress there, a slightly older woman (by only a year and a half), a woman still married, but in the throes of divorce from an abusive husband. Your mom has great legs, he once told me. It is still, oddly enough, a great regret of mine that I did not inherit that feature from my mother.
 | My dad and four of his five brothers, during World War II. They were gathered for the memorial service in Seattle for their youngest brother, Miller, who died at Normandy on July 6, 1944. |
He loved to dance. When I was eight or nine, my parents took me out to the small town Aero Club at the local airport, a social club not uncommon in many small towns with airports around the nation in those years. We went to set up the airport’s social hall for a dance that night. The music played – Big Band music, something by one of the Dorsey brothers, I suspect – and Dad grasped my hands and positioned my Ked-clad feet on top of his shoes and we waltzed around the hall for several minutes while other adults on ladders stringing banners and streamers turned and sang the words of the music and clapped and tapped in accompaniment. I was the only child there – my folks were one of only two couples in town with a young child at their advanced age of parenthood. Not so strange now, but few parents in the 1960’s had children when they were in their forties, like my folks did. When I think back on this now, I realize how fortunate I was and also how odd it was to grow up in what was almost entirely an adult world. But when I was young, it didn’t seem strange.
 | Jimmy Stewart (George): What do you want, Mary? Do you want the moon? If you want it, I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down for you. Hey! That's a pretty good idea! I'll give you the moon, Mary.
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Today, just for today, I’m grieving for my dad. There are so many things we could have shared, so many things I could have showed him. The small things. The big things. I remember his patience, for he taught me to ride a bicycle when I was eight, after my older brother gave up in frustration. When I used that bike to attempt to run away from home six months later, my mother tracked me (just four blocks away) and used the age-old threat of "Wait until your father comes home!" I know her instructions to my dad centered on lecturing me and then spanking me to drive home the point. My dad got home and called me out to the back yard. "Yell a bit to make your mother happy." So I yelled, puzzled at his request.
"There. Now let’s talk. You aren’t going to do that again, right?"
"No."
"Okay. Well, enough said."
He took me to the local ice cream shop in his old yellow Chevy pickup, which smelled of diesel fuel, gear grease and tools and spilled coffee with cream. He always insisted on driving the old stick shift pickup with a white Fire King mug full of coffee in one hand, the hand on the wheel, when he drove to work in the morning, attempting to shift with the other. So the interior always smelled peculiarly of Folgers coffee accented with machine oil. At the ice cream shop, we taste-tested the new-fangled black licorice ice cream, just in from the big city, but we bought two scoops of strawberry ice cream.
 | Sometime in the late fifties, on the Smith River, California. |
I never ran away from home again. My mother never asked me what my father said. I try to remember Dad’s patience still, when it comes time to "have a talk" with one of my children.
When he spoke, I remember listening. It wasn’t just his words I heard.
 | Henry Travers (Clarence): One man's life touches so many others, when he's not there it leaves an awfully big hole.
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Quotes liberally lifted from "It's a Wonderful Life", starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.
I have linked a few diaries of folks here from the past week who’ve mentioned their dads, or other family members, or who are at some waystation on the path of grief.
Nolalily’s Death is so final
Timroff’s This would have been a depressing C&J comment...
and
My Dad's Cancer story, updated
One Pissed off Liberal’s Before I Sleep
Dsnodgrass’ We Live, Then We Die: Larry Snodgrass R.I.P.
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Thanks, all, for reading. Comments on your own dad or others you are thinking of are appreciated, as always. Dem in the Heart of texas has created a query which will provide you with all the diaries each Monday in The Grieving Room series diaries, if you'd like to read back in time.
